Page:Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times.djvu/15



recent times absentee ownership has come to be the main and immediate controlling interest in the life of civilised men. It is the paramount issue between the civilised nations, and guides the conduct of their affairs at home and abroad. The Great War arose out of a conflict of absentee interests and the Peace was negotiated with a view to stabilise them.

This state of things is not precisely new, nor has it come on suddenly. It is a growth out of the past, but it has reached something like a culmination during these opening decades of the century; and it is an outcome of cumulative changes which have been directed to no such end. The years of the Great War and the Armistice have brought many things to a head, and among other things they have also thrown this factor into the foreground of the situation. And the experience of the War and after has stirred men to a crude and uneasy realisation of this state of things. Under one form of words or another, issues which arise out of the sovereign rights of absentee ownership are stirring the popular sentiment and engaging the attention of the officials with an ever increasing urgency. These issues are the substance of all those desperate perplexities that beset the constituted authorities and they underlie all those dissensions that continually trouble the nation’s industry and business. With the result that popular attention and sentiment are